10 Dead, 50 Injured After Briefcase Bomb In St. Petersburg Metro; Second Device Found & Disabled - Live Feed

SUMMARY:

• An explosion occurred on a St. Petersburg Metro Train -  between Sennaya Square and the Institute of Technology


• At least 10 dead


• At least 50 injured


• Device was an IED with shrapnel - left in a briefcase


• Entire Transit system shutdown


• Putin considering possible terrorist links


• A second explosive device has been found and disabled


• Russian news reports say that a security camera has caught a person who could be responsible for a blast on St. Petersburg subway.

Live Feed:

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Update 5: Explosive device was left in briefcase in metro carriage - Interfax. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast.

Update 4: A second device has been found -  Russian anti-terrorism committee says it has found and deactivated a bomb at another St. Petersburg subway station.

The National Anti-Terrorist Committee has confirmed that a makeshift bomb has been found at the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station in St. Petersburg and disposed of.

"At the Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station in St. Petersburg a makeshift explosive device was found and rendered harmless on Monday," National Antiterrorist Committee spokesman Andrey Przhezdomsky told the Rossiya-24 television news channel. "It was done promptly and professionally."

"Special services and law enforcement agencies keep taking crucial measures to identify and avert terrorist threats," the National Anti-Terrorist Committee said.

Update 3: The Mail is reporting at least 50 injured including children. Bloomberg reports the device was an IED with shrapnel.

The entire transit system has been shut down as bomb squads and rescuers are responding to the emergency.

Russian president Vladimir Putin says authorities are considering all possible causes of St Petersburg metro explosion including terrorism.

Russian president Vladimir Putin says authorities are considering all possible causes of St Petersburg metro explosion including terrorism

— Sky News Newsdesk (@SkyNewsBreak) April 3, 2017

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Update 2: Russian news services reporting at least 10 dead... (via TASS)

... at least ten people were killed, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

Preliminary reports indicate that some 10 people may have been killed and 20 injured in the blast, news agencies said citing sources close to the investigation.

The Tass news agency and Reuters said that 10 have been killed.

Interfax also said about 10 had died, with about 20 injured.

Selfie nation strikes once again...

Update 1: More details of a possible second explosion at the "Sennaya Ploschad [square]" Station note at least 10 people were injured.

Fire brigades are investigating reports of smoke at the Sennaya Ploshchad metro station in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, a regional Emergencies Ministry official told Sputnik on Monday.

"Preliminarily, there is strong smoke. Smoke protection service experts have been dispatched. The source of the smoke is being investigated," the source said.

Seven stations closed on city subway network - "Victory Park", "Electrosila", "Moskovskiye Vorota", "Frunze", "Institute of Technology", "Sennaya Ploshchad", "Gostiny Dvor".

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As we detailed earlier, reports are coming of an explosion at the Teknologicheskiy Institut metro station in St.Petersburg, Russia that has left several injured...

The metro management said they received reports of an explosion inside the car, possibly of an improvised explosive device.

Rosbalt reports that (via Google Translate)

At the train station "Technological Institute", an explosion occurred. This was reported by eyewitnesses.

According to them, many people have suffered as a result of the incident. On the published photo shows that the car door is badly damaged. Station platform clouded by smoke.

Details are not yet known. Official comments yet failed to get.

The situation does not look good...

There are many ambulances present already...

The station has been evacuated...

Another Senior Russian Official Has Died

Since the day of Donald Trump"s election, high-ranking Russian officials have been dropping like flies and today"s reports that a top official of Russia"s space agency has been found dead brings the total to eight.

As we noted previously, six Russian diplomats have died in the last 3 months - all but one died on foreign soil. Some were shot, while other causes of death are unknown. Note that a few deaths have been labeled "heart attacks" or "brief illnesses."

1. You probably remember Russia"s Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov — he was assassinated by a police officer at a photo exhibit in Ankara on December 19.

2. On the same day, another diplomat, Peter Polshikov, was shot dead in his Moscow apartment. The gun was found under the bathroom sink but the circumstances of the death were under investigation. Polshikov served as a senior figure in the Latin American department of the Foreign Ministry.

3. Russia"s Ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, died in New York this past week. Churkin was rushed to the hospital from his office at Russia"s UN mission. Initial reports said he suffered a heart attack, and the medical examiner is investigating the death, according to CBS.

4. Russia"s Ambassador to India, Alexander Kadakin, died after a "brief illness January 27, which The Hindu said he had been suffering from for a few weeks.

5. Russian Consul in Athens, Greece, Andrei Malanin, was found dead in his apartment January 9. A Greek police official said there was "no evidence of a break-in." But Malanin lived on a heavily guarded street. The cause of death needed further investigation, per an AFP report. Malanin served during a time of easing relations between Greece and Russia when Greece was increasingly critiqued by the EU and NATO.

6. Ex-KGB chief Oleg Erovinkin, who was suspected of helping draft the Trump dossier, was found dead in the back of his car December 26, according to The Telegraph. Erovinkin also was an aide to former deputy prime minister Igor Sechin, who now heads up state-owned Rosneft.

If we go back further than 3 months...

7. On the morning of U.S. Election Day, Russian diplomat Sergei Krivov was found unconscious at the Russian Consulate in New York and died on the scene. Initial reports said Krivov fell from the roof and had blunt force injuries, but Russian officials said he died from a heart attack. BuzzFeed reports Krivov may have been a Consular Duty Commander, which would have put him in charge of preventing sabotage or espionage.

8. In November 2015, a senior adviser to Putin, Mikhail Lesin, who was also the founder of the media company RT, was found dead in a Washington hotel room according to the NYT. The Russian media said it was a "heart attack," but the medical examiner said it was "blunt force injuries."

9. If you go back a few months prior in September 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s driver was killed too in a freak car accident while driving the Russian President’s official black BMW  to add to the insanity.

If you include these three additional deaths that’s a total of nine Russian officials that have died over the past 2 years... until today...

As AP reports, a top official of Russia"s space agency has been found dead in a prison where he was being held on charges of embezzlement.

A spokeswoman for Russia"s Investigative Committee, Yulia Ivanova, told the state news agency RIA Novosti that the 11 other people in Vladimir Evdokimov"s cell were being questioned.

Investigators found two stab wounds on Evdokimov"s body, but no determination had been made of whether they were self-inflicted.

Evdokimov, 56, was the executive director for quality control at Roscosmos, the country"s spaceflight and research agency.

He was jailed in December on charges of embezzling 200 million rubles ($3.1 million) from the MiG aerospace company.

So, while motive is unclear in all of these cases, that brings the total number of dead Russian officials in the past two years to ten. Probably nothing...

Former Chicago Police Chief: 'Black Lives Matter' To Blame For Rise In Violent Crime

Submitted by Joseph Jankowski via PlanetFreeWill.com,

Former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy on Sunday blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for causing an uptick in violent crime inside the country.

According to The Hill, McCarthy blamed protests against police brutality in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and Charlotte, N.C., for creating a “political atmosphere of anti-police sentiment.”

“So what’s happening, and this is ironic, is that a movement with the goal of saving black lives at this point is getting black lives taken, because 80 percent of our murder victims here in Chicago are male blacks,” McCarthy said during a radio interview with John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York on Sunday.

“Less than half of 1 percent of all the shootings in this city involve police officers shooting civilians.”

McCarthy was fired last year from his position as Police Chief over the controversy caused by a fatal police-involved shooting in October 2014 of a black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald.

Dashcam footage released a year after the shooting showed the teenager being shot more than a dozen times while walking away from officers.

An involved officer was charged with first-degree murder.

McCarthy admitted that it was a “bad shooting” and the officer deserved punishment, but argued that the uproar over police brutality is “hamstringing” law enforcement.

“We are very clearly going down the wrong path,” he said Sunday.

McCarthy express his hopefulness that President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, will do more to empower police than President Obama’s Justice Department.

“I think the Trump election quite frankly is a reaction to that,” the former Police Chief said.

“I think the people are tired of career politicians who’ve never really had a job telling us how we should think and how we should act.”

McCarthy’s words come just days after one of Los Angeles’ top policemen filed a restraining order against a leading Black Lives Matter activist who has allegedly been stalking him and making violent threats against him and his children.

Manhunt Underway For Gunman Who Killed 39 At Istanbul Nightclub

A manhunt was underway for a gunman who opened fire on people at a packed nightclub on the shores of Istanbul"s Bosphorus waterway on New Year"s morning, killing at least 39 people, including 15 foreigners, then fled the scene.

The suspect escaped the scene by changing clothes at the club after the attack, according to reports on Turkish media. There have also been rumors that there was a second attacker, but officials are now just talking about one terrorist.

While Turkish authorities are starting to uncover evidence about a gun attack on an Istanbul nightclub which killed 39 people on Sunday but there is no clarity yet on who was responsible, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said. "Some details have started emerging, but the authorities are working towards a concrete result," Yildirim told reporters, when asked about who might have been behind the attack.

"Police and security officials will share information as it becomes available during the investigation," he said.

While no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, Metin Gurcan, an Istanbul-based security analyst, told BBC "signs point to the Islamic State."

Security camera footage obtained by AP from Haberturk newspaper, shows the male assailant dressed in black and carrying a backpack as he shoots down a police officer outside the Reina nightclub. Footage taken by a different camera shows him inside the venue wearing different clothes and a Santa Claus hat.

"A manhunt for the terrorist is underway. Police have launched operations. We hope the attacker will be captured soon," said Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu adding that 15 or 16 of those killed at Reina were foreigners but only 21 bodies had so far been identified.  He told reporters 69 people were in hospital, four of them in critical condition.

Nationals of Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Lebanon, Libya, Israel and Belgium were among those killed, officials said. France said three of its citizens were wounded.

The attacker, armed with a long-barreled weapon, killed a policeman and a civilian outside Istanbul"s popular Reina club at around 1:15 a.m. before entering and firing on people partying inside, Istanbul governor Vasip Sahin said.

"Unfortunately (he) rained bullets in a very cruel and merciless way on innocent people who were there to celebrate New Year"s and have fun," Sahin told reporters.

A Turkish coast guard boat patrols in front of the Reina nightclub by the Bosphorus

As Reuters notes, the attack shook NATO member Turkey as it tries to recover from a failed July coup and a series of deadly bombings in cities including Istanbul and the capital Ankara, some blamed on Islamic State and others claimed by Kurdish militants. What makes the deadly terrorist attack even worse is that across Europe security services had been on alert for new year celebrations following the mid-December attack on a Christmas market in Berlin that killed 12 people. Only days ago, an online message from a pro-Islamic State group called for attacks by "lone wolves" on "celebrations, gatherings and clubs".

The Turkish Hurriyet newspaper cited witnesses as saying the attackers shouted in Arabic as they opened fire at Reina. "We were having fun. All of a sudden people started to run. My husband said don"t be afraid, and he jumped on me. People ran over me. My husband was hit in three places," one club-goer, Sinem Uyanik, told the newspaper. "I managed to push through and get out, it was terrible," she said, describing seeing people soaked in blood.

Police secure the area near the Istanbul nightclub on January 1, 2017.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vehemently condemned "the terror attack in Istanbul"s Ortakoy neighborhood in the first hours of 2017" and offered condolences for those who lost their lives, including "foreign guests." He dubbed the New Year’s shooting spree “dirty games,” vowing Turkey will fight to the end against all forms of terrorist attacks. 

"As a nation, we will fight to the end against not just the armed attacks of terror groups, but also against their economic, political and social attacks," President Tayyip Erdogan said in a written statement. "They are trying to create chaos, demoralize our people, and destabilize our country ... We will retain our cool-headedness as a nation, standing more closely together, and we will never give ground to such dirty games," he said.

Erdogan linked the attack to the situation in the region. Turkey neighbors Syria, where Ankara is conducting a military operation called Euphrates Shield, which is said to be targeting Islamic State and YPG forces.

The news received a strong international response, as world leaders, including those of Poland, Iran and Greece, condemned the attack.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his Turkish counterpart a a telegram of condolences, saying "it is hard to imagine a more cynical crime than killing innocent people during New Year celebrations" adding that "terrorists don"t share moral values. Our common duty is to combat terrorists" aggression."

U.S. President Barack Obama, on vacation in Hawaii, expressed condolences and directed his team to offer help to the Turkish authorities, the White House said.

Despite repeated warnings of a possible terrorist attack at a night club, an even bigger tragedy was avoided thanks to the prompt police response: dozens of ambulances and police vehicles were immediately dispatched to the club in Ortakoy, a neighborhood on the city"s European side nestled under one of three bridges crossing the Bosphorus and home to nightclubs, restaurants and art galleries, once news of the shooting around 1:15am local time emerged.

"I didn"t see who was shooting but heard the gun shots and people fled. Police moved in quickly," Sefa Boydas, a Turkish soccer player, wrote on Twitter. "My girlfriend was wearing high heels. I lifted her and carried her out on my back," he said.

Hurriyet quoted Reina"s owner, Mehmet Kocarslan, as saying security measures had been taken over the past 10 days after U.S. intelligence reports suggested a possible attack.

“US intelligence warned about such an attack about one week or 10 days ago – and measures were taken, including [on] the sea front. And look what has happened,” Kocarslan told Hurriyet.

As many as 600 people were thought to have been inside the club at the time of the attack. The Hurriyet newspaper cited witnesses as saying the attacker shouted in Arabic at Reina. "We were having fun. All of a sudden people started to run. My husband said don"t be afraid, and he jumped on me. People ran over me. My husband was hit in three places," one club-goer, Sinem Uyanik, told the newspaper.

"I managed to push through and get out, it was terrible," she said, describing seeing people soaked in blood.

Meanwhile, the Turkish response to the tragedy was familiar: a full media clamp down. The prime minister"s office issued a media blackout on the events and asked media to refrain from broadcasting and publishing anything that may cause "fear in the public, panic and disorder and which may serve the aims of terrorist organizations."

Security measures had been heightened in major Turkish cities, with police barring traffic leading up to key squares in Istanbul and the capital Ankara. In Istanbul, 17,000 police officers were put on duty, some disguised as Santa Claus and others as street vendors, Turkey"s Anadolu news agency reported.